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Does Google have a better track record when it comes to arbitrarily locking people out of their digital lives?


No.

But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement. You can use an Android device with GrapheneOS and have the phone entirely de-Googled, yet still use Android apps.

If the implication was that there's no other option outside of Apple and Google then that is unfortunate.


Does your bank let you use such a device? Does any big bank where you live?

If I want to participate it modern life, where I live, I need an Android (Google blessed) or Apple device.


The bank thing is a much rarer problem than people make it out to be. We should challenge and boycott any problematic banks as much as we can https://community.e.foundation/t/list-banking-apps-on-e-os/3...


Ok so now we’re not only boycotting Apple, we’re boycotting banks as well! Seriously, Apple can and should fix this issue without having to retort to misery for everyone.

Apple could release a statement reassuring people that no one will be locked out of their account for redeeming any gift card going forward. We have collectively forgotten that companies have stopped talking this way. That’s what we need to change.


I mean, yes, absolutely. I don't have a count limit on my boycott list. I won't be holding my breath for empty promises from corporate. We need to build systems that assert user sovereignty and prevent abuse, not wait around for evil people to do good things.


My bank does let me use such a device. In fact all big banks I use (and I use about a half dozen) work just fine on GrapheneOS.

> If I want to participate it modern life, where I live, I need an Android (Google blessed) or Apple device.

"Modern life..." - wow. The only thing I'm not doing that you are is tap to pay with your phone. I have cards that work just fine for this use case. Stone age, right? Not sure if anyone could survive in a modern society without it. o_O


Tbf banks are truly driving the coercion. My banks used to have functional apps on bare GrapheneOS, but nowadays they won't launch without Play Services (to wich I can deny network access, pretty neat of GrapheneOS). Plus my main bank now requires the app even for web access. Nightmarish.


> But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement.

For now, but they are tightening things up.

And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.

(And this back and forth can go on for a long time...)

You are just picking what is important to you and then ignoring other issues. That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.


> And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.

What?

In fact you have more (and better) options on an Android based device.

> That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.

Cool story. But it's OK for you to craft advice on a topic you're not well versed in (cloud sync)? Seems like you're ignoring some issues and misunderstanding needs that you're completely unaware of in a pretty straightforward domain.


Does SD1.5 suffer from resolution / coherence / complexity issues?

I understand most outputs could be fine tuned for most domains, but still felt sd1.5 had a resolution ceiling, and a complexity ceiling no matter how good the fine tuning


Yeah SD 1.5 is mostly trained on datasets of resolution of 512x512. That's why you'd get crazy multi-limb goro abominations if you pushed checkpoints too much higher than 768x768 without either using a Hires Fix or Img2Img.

There's not much of a reason to use SD 1.5 over SDXL if image quality is paramount.

A lot of people (myself included) use a pipeline that involves using Flux to get the basic action / image correct, then SDXL as a refiner and finally a decent NMKD-based upscaler.


Yes, the toolchains around it can alleviate it, but only to a degree. You more or less dependent on a fine tune specifically trained for the things you want. But if you have that, the image quality is usually far better than from any generic model in my opinion, aside from resolution.

Merging any or all concepts is mostly beyond it, but I haven't seen any model being good at it yet. There are some that are significantly better, but often come with other disadvantages.

Overall what these models can do is quite impressive. But if you want a really high quality image, finding the fitting model is as difficult as finding the right prompt. And the general models tend to always fall back to some mean AI standard image.


They may have some idea, but they definitely don’t know for sure— there could very well be innocent people on the boat. I’m not sure why arrests are not an option in these cases. It would be great press to announce “x kilos of cocaine captured”, “6 drug smugglers apprehended”

Instead it’s just “boat bombed, terrorists killed, drugs destroyed” with no proof that they’re terrorists or that there are drugs.


> with no proof

That’s why arrests are not an option.


The proof would be the drugs on the boat. Unless they're bombing alleged drug dealers on pleasure cruises.


There aren’t drugs on the boat.


how do you know?


It’s not dissimilar to George Bush’s weapons of mass destruction lie.


I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.


I like this idea. While it’s great to have all the music at my fingertips via Alexa + Apple Music (or Spotify etc), it’s actually not very conducive to browsing or recalling all the music and albums I like.

Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.


I built https://dailyalbum.art/ to solve a part of the browsing problem you're talking about. Nothing physical I'm afraid, but I do really love this RFID tap to play idea!

I've curated a list of 500+ critically acclaimed albums, which I continue to add to as the Mercury Prize nominees are announced each year, Rough Trade releases its albums of the year, etc.

It picks 12 a day and that's that; it's the same 12 for everyone. If you see something familiar, you might want to go for that. Or if you're in the mood for something new & different, you can give something unknown a try.


Not op, but to me this resonates because none of it is “mine”, none of it exists in the real world. There’s a huge difference between the music I physically collected (from libraries, friends, Best Buy, Christmas gifts, used cd stores) and uploaded into my iPod and lived with for years vs music I searched on a whim, listened to for a month while it was in my “recents” and then eventually forgot about once it was pushed out by something else.


I think they are “convincing you” because you are on the opposite side of an opinion.

You’ll notice in this thread, many anti-tracking people are trying to convince pro tracking people, and vise versa. This is common when there are two opposing sides of an argument.


What is the fascist lubricant you refer to?


I’m not yet up to half (because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI)

But your approach sounds familiar to me. I find sometimes it may be slower and lower quality to use AI, but it requires less mental bandwidth from me, which is sometimes a worthwhile trade off.


> because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI

What language? I picked up an old JS project that had several developers fail over weeks to upgrade to newer versions of react. But I got it done in a day by using AI to generate a ton of unit tests then loop an upgrade / test / build. Was 9 years out of date and it’s running in prod now with less errors than before.

Also upgraded rails 4 app to rails 8 over a few days.

Done other apps too. None of these are small. Found a few memory leaks in a C++ app that our senior “experts” who have spent 20 years doing c++ couldn’t find.


I agree with your take, but at the same time, I’m not sure these things should ever do math. I know that they can, but it seems impossible to draw the line of math they can do vs math they shouldn’t do. A part of me suspects they should always be outsourcing any math to a tool.


Absolutely, but the ability to perform complex math in one step seems like a good indicator that it isn’t just a convincing conversational autocomplete anymore.


But is it anything more than a convincing mathematical autocomplete? Or a convincing code autocomplete? Mathematics and code are themselves primarily conversational tools, with side effects.


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